A funny thing happening on the way towards widespread adoption of social media marketing: The use of global social networks as traditional publishing — and hence brand marketing — platforms was rightly perceived as a fairly limited way to connect with and gain the trusted, meaningful engagement of customers and prospects.

By now, everyone has heard that social media is an intrinsically different medium, and indeed, it is more involving, demanding, and harder to control than traditional media. In short, after years of declining results in old channels, companies have finally come to terms with the fact they must fundamentally rethink how they connect with the marketplace.

In the last couple of years, companies have increasingly sought out so-called ‘genuine’ and ‘authentic’ new ways of reaching out to, conversing with, and otherwise collaborating together in useful ways with those on social media on topics of mutual interest, namely the products and services that they provide. This has led to countless experiments in adapting social media to the marketing function in our organizations, while also living up to both the standards (and expectations) of the new social channels.

The question has always been, however, how to best use social media with the least cynicism and the greatest effect to truly engage with the marketplace, while having measurable and cost effective business impact. While the short term goal of such activity might be driving new transactions (sales and other outcomes), the long term goal is to partner with and co-create the best joint outcomes. This includes producing better products, ensuring they are supported well, and more prosaic yet very valuable results such as increasing margins and reducing time to sale.

Over the last several years, we’ve started to see a new trend clearly emerge from leading social businesses: Companies dealing with the realization that they have limited — and relatively untrusted — amounts of social capital in their possession. Certainly, a few companies are doing extremely well in this regard, but the total level of reach in social media of even most large brands is relatively limited.

Yet those very same companies also have legions of interested parties who do have — at least collectively — a tremendous amount of social capital that they just might be willing to employ for mutual benefit. If only they had guidance on how best to do it.

In short, savvy companies can strategically enlist their workforce, business partners, supply chain, customers, and other interested stakeholders to become advocates, if the right motivation exists. Now, while I observed recently that the environment for advocacy in social media has grown increasingly favorable, and the infrastructure, techniques, and management processes have moved beyond early experimentaton, we really haven’t talked about specific examples of successful social media advocacy programs. In other words, is there actually good evidence that advocacy works and is happening?

Fortunately, the lack of good examples of social advocacy programs is no longer the issue. In fact, we find they are starting to thrive in many industries, even while the exact result and approach remain relatively varied, usually a sign of early days. For now, the advocacy programs that exist currently are largely focused on the constituency that companies have the most direct influence over, namely employees, though certainly we know of good examples across the constituency spectrum.

In terms of trust and predictability, employees make a good ‘starter’ group for companies to get up to speed on creating an advocate program. Employees obviously have a vested interest in furthering the goals of the company, and their alignment with the organization’s interests and objectives is presumably (though certainly not always) why they are employed there.

Eight examples of employee advocacy programs

Here are a breakdown of some of the advocacy programs — many current, and some past — that leading enterprises have engaged in:

IBM. The global technology firm has 500 thought leaders in its IBM Voices advocacy program, including a matching portal to centralize and promote their social presence.

Cisco. The communications company has over 1,300 advocates that are given guidelines and support to amplify the company’s messages and get the word out about new products and services as well as provide support to customers.

Dell. The computer manufacturer has one of the largest social media advocacy programs in the world. Over 10,000 employees having gone through their internal social media certification program and are trained to support the company’s objectives in social media. What’s more, they have an advanced listening and triage program to mobilize advocates to address time critical situations in social channels.

SAP. Long a leader in using social media to engage with the marketplace, SAP’s has its SAP Mentor program that recognizes its most effective advocates, gives them prestige and makes it easier for the public to find and engage with them.

H&R Block. The tax preparation firm uses an internal social media hub as part of its program to connect employees with the public in social media. It has also used advocates effectively in recent marketing and sales efforts.

Note, that these examples are tech heavy, as we often see with social media. Fortunately, we are now seeing more traditional companies try their hand at advocacy programs now. Also, there is a good mix of B2B and B2C stories when it comes to employee advocacy which is encouraging.

Up next, I will explore good examples of social media advocacy programs with business partners, customers, and even supply chains.